纠正大模型强化学习中奖励分配不均问题,提升训练稳定性和生成质量。
When Importance Sampling Misallocates Credit: Asymmetric Ratios for Outcome-Supervised RL
- 提出非对称重要性采样策略,修正正向奖励下令牌权重失衡问题。
- 实验显示可显著缓解熵崩溃,提升数学与编程任务性能。
- 适合研究大模型强化学习、奖励建模与训练稳定性优化的学者。
强化学习在大语言模型后训练中展现出巨大潜力,通常依赖词元级裁剪以保持优化稳定。尽管GRPO类方法在实践中表现良好,我们发现这一主流结果监督强化学习(OSRL)范式存在一个此前未被重视的根本性挑战。在OSRL中,优势值在整个响应内共享,重要性采样(IS)比率偏离了经典强化学习中的分布校正作用,转而成为词元级权重,用于分配共享的优势信号。我们揭示这种隐含的角色转变导致正向优势词元出现严重权重偏差,造成正负词元间更新不平衡:低频词元被抑制,高频词元被过度放大。这引发富者愈富的动态,加剧自信词元的强化,削弱追赶学习,导致熵崩溃、重复生成和过早收敛。为此,我们提出非对称重要性采样策略优化(ASPO),通过反转正向优势词元的比率加权,同时稳定极端更新并维持梯度流动。该修正使正向词元的更新方向与负向词元一致。在数学推理与编程基准上的全面实验表明,ASPO能显著缓解熵崩溃,改善训练稳定性,并超越强基线的GRPO方法。我们的分析为OSRL中词元级加权的作用提供了新见解,强调纠正比率诱导加权的关键性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise in large language models (LLMs) post-training, which typically rely on token-level clipping to maintain stability during optimization. Despite the empirical success of GRPO-style methods, we identify a fundamental and previously overlooked challenge in this popular Outcome-Supervised RL (OSRL) paradigm. We reveal that in OSRL, where advantages are shared across tokens within a response, importance sampling (IS) ratios deviate from their traditional purpose of distribution correction as in classic RL, which become token-level weights that allocate the shared advantage signal across tokens. We show that this hidden role shift induces a critical mismatch for positive-advantage tokens, leading to unbalanced token weighting between positive and negative tokens. Specifically, it suppresses the update of underrepresented tokens that are lagging behind, while over-amplifying already high-probability tokens. This mismatch results in rich-get-richer dynamics that over-reinforce confident tokens, weaken catch-up learning that drive entropy collapse, excessive repetition, and premature convergence. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Importance Sampling Policy Optimization (ASPO), a simple yet effective strategy that reverses the ratio-induced weighting of positive-advantage tokens, while stabilizing extreme updates and maintaining gradient flow. This mismatch correction aligns their update direction with the learning dynamics of negative ones. Comprehensive experiments across math reasoning and coding benchmarks demonstrate that ASPO significantly mitigates entropy collapse, improves training stability, and enhances performance over strong GRPO-based baselines. Our analysis provides new insights into the role of token-level weighting in OSRL and highlights the critical importance of correcting ratio-induced weighting in LLM RL.
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